Herbs

Food growing in the yard might not count as “convenience food,” but it can be mighty convenient. Sometimes, when I am putting supper together and missing an ingredient, a decent substitute is out in my organic garden.

Most recently, the needed ingredient was cooked spinach. Some years, I have plenty of spinach in the garden, but the local wild bunnies demolished this year’s spinach patch. The good news is that greens are probably the easiest veggie to substitute from the garden.

Chicory as a substitute for spinach in cooking

I have a little patch of kale, which would work as a spinach-substitute if there were more of it. You may remember, though, my patch of chicory, defended from the bunnies by a blockade of sticks. The blockade, after I added a lot more sticks, did work, and the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, selected for its roots used in making chicory coffee, grew.

Chicory to the left shows the bunny-damaged chicory patch before I beefed-up the stick blockade.

I harvested about a third of the leaves from the patch, to use as a spinach substitute, in my recent vegetable lasagna.

Picture to the right shows the successfully-defended chicory patch, with taller sticks still visible, poking up around the plants.

Some of the roots are finally large enough that I will dig them up in the next few weeks to make my coffee. This is a benefit of living in the South: the ground will not be frozen anytime soon. Digging up roots is still possible.

I will say, though, that the leaves of the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, chosen for its roots, are not as tasty as the leaves of some other chicories I have grown in the past, like the ‘Italiko rosso’ in the picture to the left.

The problem with the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory leaves is an intensified bitterness. I had to boil and drain the ‘Magdeburg’ leaves a couple of times to get to an acceptably-low level of bitterness. ‘Italiko rosso’ is mildly bitter, but I have never had to do the boil-then-drain thing with that variety.

Convenient herb tea from the yard

Another convenient plant in the garden right now is oregano. In a few weeks, the oregano patch will lose a lot of its leaves, but — here in early December — it still looks great. The patch is thick with fresh, fragrant leaves.

We use our fresh herbs pretty frequently in cooking. I hadn’t thought, though, about using oregano to make an herbal tea until I read about it last week.

Since I like to use crops-in-the-yard as fully as possible, oregano tea seemed like a thing to try.

An old (2017) article on Livestrong.com tells about some potential benefits of oregano, especially oregano oil, but is very careful to not make a lot of overblown health claims for the tea. I appreciate the cautious approach!

I made tea using fresh oregano leaves on two separate days last week. The first day, I added honey and lemon, and the tea was good enough that I made another cup the next day. The second time, though, I drank it “straight”, without any additions. Let me just say that the first version, with honey and lemon, was MUCH better than the second.

If anyone is curious — oregano tea tastes pretty much like oregano. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but finding it out in person made me laugh.

I am having oregano tea again today, with local honey and a squeeze of a lemon-like fruit that was grown by my friend Eddie.

When I listed tasks for the fall garden in an earlier blog post, and again in the more recent one on fall tasks for herbs, I totally forgot to mention gathering and saving seeds. For many gardeners, this is such an automatic behavior — like breathing — that it is easy to forget to mention it, but I should have remembered.

A few last seedheads for ‘Red Rubin’ basil, set aside to dry for saving the seeds.

The last quarterly meeting for the year for Cobb Community Gardens was held near the end of October, and it featured a seed-swap. One person who could not attend sent an enormous bag stuffed full with seedheads from her purple coneflower patch.

If I hadn’t already saved seeds from my earliest-blooming ‘Red Rubin’ basil, the meeting should have been enough of a reminder.

If there are still unexploded seedheads in your garden, for plants you’d like to have more of next year (coneflowers, coreopsis, milkweed, basil, horehound, mints, etc.), gathering those seeds now, to dry for several days and then store airtight and in-the-fridge, is a good idea.

Basil seeds typically don’t shake out easily until the stalks are dry. Removing leaves from the stalks speeds up the drying, and any leaves still in good condition can be used in the kitchen.

If you have tree onions (aka: walking onions, winter onions, top onions) that have dropped bulblets to the ground, these can be separated and replanted, to grow more onions. Mine are from my stepdad, Bill, and he called them winter onions.

These plants make bulblets (or top sets), that look like tiny onions, on a stalk. You can see a cluster of sprouting bulblets in the photo collage below. Anyone who doesn’t have a free source of these (another gardener) might look into buying a few. They multiplied in my garden pretty quickly, from an original cluster of five bulblets.

Elsewhere in my garden, I still have chicory roots to dig up. The roots have not grown as large as I had hoped, so I plan to harvest only half of the plants this year. This would leave the other half to continue growing next year, to make bigger roots for coffee-roasting. I may have to buy some extra chicory this year to stretch my supply.

Collection of photos showing state of the garden in fall: radishes, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and more.

Pictures in the photo-collage above are representative, but do not show all the good things growing in my garden. Kale and lettuces also are growing. There would have been beets and spinach, but critters ate those while they were still small.

The radishes you see up above are ‘French breakfast’ salad-type radishes. The winter radishes (not pictured) are bigger. We will be able to use a few in our family gathering that is coming up later this month.

Are there herbs in your garden? When that first freeze arrives, tender annuals like basil, dill, and cardamon will die. Some perennial herbs like mint, comfrey, and anise hyssop will die back above ground, but regrow from their roots in spring. Many of these herbs will have an easier winter with help from the gardener.

How can we help our herbs survive the winter?

According to North Carolina State University, a layer of mulch will protect perennials, like mint and fennel, that die back in winter, from temperatures down around 20 degrees F. The article explains:

A winter mulch helps maintain uniform soil temperatures around the root system and provides protection against heaving cause by frequent freezing and thawing of the soil.

In other words, if your garden experiences freezing and thawing through the winter, a light layer of mulch laid around the herbs can reduce stress on their roots. That reduction in stress from freeze/thaw cycles in winter can result in healthier plants in spring.

The special case of rosemary

One herb in particular is likely to die in a harsh winter, and that is rosemary. In hardiness zone 8, and certainly in zone 9, all varieties of rosemary should survive the winter with no trouble. Where I live, zone 7b, some rosemary varieties don’t make it through the winter.

The variety in my garden is called ‘Arp’. It is the least graceful of all rosemary plants, but it is the most cold-hardy. If I were growing one of the more beautiful but less hardy varieties, I would follow NCSU’s advice: after the first hard freeze, cut the plant to a stub, just a few inches tall, then mound soil and mulch around the stub to keep it safe through winter.

The result would not be beautiful in the garden, but it might save the gardener’s budget from having to replace the rosemary next spring.

There are some happier late-autumn garden tasks than considering whether to completely cut back your rosemary bush. Mostly, these tasks are about harvesting.

Which herbs do we harvest at the end of autumn?

If there are any annual herbs left in the garden, now is the time to finish harvesting those (basil, dill, fennel, hyssop, for example). This year I grew my big crop of dill in spring, then put it all in our dehydrator (the Excaliber has a setting low enough to be safe for herbs), so we would have dill all winter. Some gardeners may have planted a late crop of dill, or they may have Holy Basil to dry for Tulsi tea. That all needs to be harvested before the weather turns truly cold.

Fading leaves of goldenseal signal that now is the time to harvest its roots.

Some gardeners, such as those in the Piedmont region, may have goldenseal, ginseng, or bloodroot ready to harvest in their woodland gardens. NCSU’s article “Harvesting and Preserving Herbs for the Home Gardener” tells us that now is the time to dig roots of these herbs — “in the fall after the foliage fades”.

Saffron crocus are up in my yard and ready for harvest, too. The flowers don’t last long, so the saffron patch needs to be checked daily. Harvest the long red thready-parts – also called the stigmas – (use tweezers), then set them on a plate or other dish somewhere safe to dry. For me, the flavor is even better if the strands are lightly toasted before using in recipes.

Saffron flowers are the source of the herb saffron, and they grow well in my yard. Now is the time to harvest the red stigmas that are the part we use in cooking.

If you don’t have any saffron growing in your garden yet, and you live only as far north as Atlanta, it is not too late to plant a patch (link to bulbs for purchase here) for next year.

Which herbs besides saffron can I plant now?

If you are counting garlic as an herb, then that is one to plant now. You actually have a pretty big window-of-opportunity for planting garlic in the Southeastern U.S., but the longer they have to grow, the bigger your garlics will be at harvest-time. See my earlier blog post about How to Plant Your Home Garden Garlic for more information.

In warmer parts of the South, late fall stretches further into November and December. In those areas, November is still a great month to plant perennial herbs (and shrubs and fruit trees!). In colder areas, plants set into the ground this late might not have a chance to get their roots into the ground before the freeze/thaw cycles begin. The risk is that the plants will get squeezed out of the ground (kind of like toothpaste out of a tube) in one of those cycles, and the roots dry out or become damaged where they are exposed to the cold.

I hope your herb garden provides the flavor and garden experience you are looking for!

(p.s. If this blog post is helpful or at all interesting, please “like” or “share” it so I will know I am on the right track. Thank you!)

‘Sweet Banana’ peppers mature, when grown from seed, in about 72 days. ‘California Wonder’ bell peppers mature in about 75 days. I have seeds for both of these in my “seed stash” in the fridge. When I was planning my summer, I knew that we would be gone for 77 days. Can you see where this is heading?

I learned that peppers can survive without much attention in my summer garden

Last spring, in mid-April, I started one each of the two kinds of peppers and planted them in my small garden before we left home. They both had just four leaves. They were too tiny to need any kind of support at the time, but I pushed an assortment of wire things into the ground around them, to hold them up as they grew.

No one watered them while we were gone. No one fertilized, and no one weeded.

The pepper production increased after I poured some dilute fish fertilizer around them. As usual, the ‘Sweet banana’ is making many more peppers than the ‘California wonder’. They both will continue to provide peppers until the first hard frost.

Basil, ‘Red Rubin’, is another survivor

Another crop that went into the garden before we went away was ‘Red Rubin’ basil.

I planted these in two separate patches. One patch already had flowers when we returned, but the other still is flower-free. That is the patch I am harvesting basil leaves from, to use in the kitchen.

‘Red Rubin’ has dark purplish leaves and a good basil flavor. The pesto made from it isn’t green, but that is ok.

This variety is resistant to basil downy mildew, which has been ruining basil harvests around here for a few years now. The disease resistance is why I chose this basil as the one to grow while we were away.

Native bees on native plants

Native bee on native coneflower. PHOTO/Amygwh

At last year’s Pollinator Symposium (described on the events page of Monarchs Across GA), I picked up a native coneflower seedling for my garden. The plant grew, and it seems happy; it was flowering when we got back, almost four weeks ago, and it is still making more flowers.

The flowers are attracting some very cute, tiny native bees. These are not the kinds of bees that live in hives; they are more likely to live alone in burrows underground. The one in the picture has pollen caught in the hairs on its back legs.

Are there “survivor” crops in your garden?

If you’ve planted a garden and then not tended it for several (or 11!) weeks, what crops have survived the neglect and managed to produce food?

The first seeds in the ground for my fall garden are two kinds of carrots and a winter radish. I also planted one last round of basil, so there will be more pesto in my freezer to use in wintertime meals.

First seeds planted for my fall garden, plus one last summer herb. PHOTO/Amygwh

This year’s carrots: ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’

The two varieties, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’, are shorter carrots that will do well in the clay soil of my in-ground garden.

‘Short stuff’ is also recommended as a good choice for container plantings. The fully-mature carrots will be only about 4-inches long, but wide at the top.

‘Bolero’ will be longer, closer to 6-inches at harvest, but slender all the way down.

I amended the soil by adding a nearly-full bucket (5-gallon size) of yard compost to the garden bed before planting. This addition will loosen the soil and improve the odds that the carrots will grow as they should.

The seedlings have not yet come up, but when they do, they will get a dose of the kind of fish emulsion fertilizer that promotes root growth (higher phosphorus than nitrogen).

You may be wondering why I already planted seeds for carrots, in mid-August. The reason is that crops mature more slowly in fall than in spring. If I want to harvest carrots before mid-December, they need to be in the ground, in my garden, now. (For more details, read my book.)

The first winter radishes

‘Watermelon’ winter radish seeds also are in the garden. The current packet says they take 60 days to reach maturity, but older packets from other seed companies have claimed 70-days, which is closer to the speed they grew in my garden. I decided to use 70-days as my working number to determine the planting date, as a result.

Most of the winter radishes will only make good bulbs in fall, in the time of shortening day length. I don’t know why. Some plants are just like that.

That means, though, that this is a crop that can ONLY be had from a fall garden. If anyone in your family loves radishes (a rare thing, I know), plant these soon!

Heat sink surprise

Raised bed with beet seedlings and young onions, in mid-August, in Chicago. PHOTO/Amygwh

When I was in Chicago last week, I noticed that many vegetable gardens already contained plenty of cool-season seedlings. Considering how much further north Chicago is from here, it made sense that fall gardening would already be well-underway.

However, when I looked up its hardiness zone, I was surprised. Chicago is in plant hardiness zone 6a, according to the newer USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. The plant hardiness zone where I live, north of Atlanta, is 7b. That difference in hardiness zones, between Chicago and north-metro-Atlanta, is less than I expected.

Most of area around Chicago (all the northern half of Illinois) is in plant hardiness zone 5, according to the USDA map. That seems more reasonable than 6a. Chicago, which is a large city containing a lot of concrete, must be the same kind of heat-sink that Atlanta is (most of Atlanta is in zone 8a). That could account for part of the difference. Lake Michigan could account for the rest, since enormous bodies of water also help keep nearby air temperatures more moderate.

Update on the ‘Astia’ zucchini

Flower bud on young ‘Astia’ zucchini plant, in the “v” between two stems (main stem and leaf petiole).

The ‘Astia’ zucchini that is growing in my half-barrel planter is still alive. There are no signs yet of leaf-mildew-diseases, which is good news. The other good news is that, even though the seedlings have only been up for a couple of weeks, I can see the buds of flowers forming on the plants.

These flower buds will keep growing, until the flower buds open. Some flowers will be “girls”, which are the ones that make the zucchini that we eat. Some flowers will be ‘boys’. After the boys have done their job of pollinating the girls, I plan to harvest those boy flowers to use in cooking.

While in Italy over the summer, Joe and I enjoyed fried squash blossoms at the Sax Wine Bar in Montepulciano. We are going to make those ourselves, since the good ladies at Sax Wine Bar are in Italy and we are not.

One new favorite food that I found while in Italy uses stale bread as its base. The dish is called panzanella locally, but in English the name is bread salad. I know — the name “bread salad” isn’t inspiring. The appearance isn’t, either. However, the flavor explains why so many people keep basil plants growing in pots on their windowsills and doorsteps. Bread salad taught me that stale bread plus tomatoes and basil equals great food.

Doorstep gardens in Tuscany, like this one, often include a pot of basil. PHOTO/Amygwh

After being served bread salad a few times here, I asked one of my new Italian friends how to make it. This is what I was told:

Traditional panzanella, or bread salad, recipe

Start with stale bread (3-4 days old) that is dry and hard.

Break up the bread, then drop the pieces into water for brief saturation. Then, squeeze out the excess water as much as possible.

Mix onion, white vinegar, and a LOT of chopped basil into the bread in small amounts. Keeping adding and mixing until the flavor is good. Then, add olive oil.

Chop tomatoes, drain them, add salt, and continue to drain them until they are fairly dry.

If cucumbers are available, chop them to add to the salad, but do not use the gel/seed part.

Tips to make the generalized recipe work

The standard, soft, sandwich-style bread that is prevalent in the U.S. might not work well in bread salad. I think that the bread needs to be the kind made of just 4 ingredients – flour, water, yeast, and salt. Whole wheat works, but so does bread made from white flour. Joe and I have made the salad with both kinds, with good results.

We don’t have a basil plant on our windowsill in Italy, but our friend makes herb-infused olive oils. She gave us a bottle of basil-infused olive oil to use instead of fresh basil, and it is glorious!

Notice that there are no guidelines for amounts of anything. Either Joe and I have been very lucky, since this is good every time we make it, or bread salad is nearly foolproof.

Less obvious (maybe) benefits of bread salad

It uses an ingredient — old, hard bread — that might otherwise be wasted. As a person who prefers to use up leftovers, even hard, stale, leftovers, rather than waste them, finding recipes for good food that use old bread well is a gift. Another way we have noticed that hard, stale bread is used is as a thickener for soups. Tomato soup, bean soup, vegetable soup — all contain bread that has been soaked, broken up, and dispersed throughout the broth.

When tomatoes are in season and piling into the kitchen in large numbers, having an easy recipe (like this one) that uses them well is helpful. Ditto for cucumbers.

If your basil is growing into an enormous plant, you can use that, too.

Let me know if you try making bread salad at home, and if you love it, too!

In hilltop towns in Tuscany (where I still am, for my husband’s job), bare ground is a rare thing. People here have had centuries to figure out where and how to grow herbs, flowers, and small vegetable plants in these mostly-stone towns. This makes Tuscany a good source of small garden ideas.

Small Garden Ideas for In-ground Gardens

For in-ground gardening, a small area can be blocked out with stones, one way or another, and one or more plants wedged into the dirt. The surface of the planting space might be just one square foot. Plants grown this way are usually tall, like rosebushes and grape vines.

Before seeing these tiny plantings, I would not have thought that one or two square feet of space was enough. Now, I can easily imagine planting a tiny garden that nourishes one or two beloved plants.

I am not sure how the small-space plants grow so well with the limited surface area, for water to soak through to the roots. If I hadn’t seen so many plants grown this way, I would not believe that it could work!

Poles set teepee style are ready for plants to grow. PHOTO/Amygwh

Slightly larger “yards”, that have more bare ground, make use of vertical space, too. Trellises or poles set teepee-style support lanky plants. Pole beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes are in this group.

Small Garden Ideas for Containers

Not too surprisingly, the most abundant form of small gardens I’ve seen in Tuscany are container gardens. In densely populated parts of towns, I see more herbs and flowers in pots than vegetables.

One herb plant can produce a lot of flavorful leaves for use in the kitchen. This makes herbs a good crop-choice for a gardener whose space is limited.

Outside the historic centers, outside the city walls, people have slightly more space for gardening. This is where I have seen more vegetables and fruits (strawberries, lemons, pomegranates) growing in containers.

These container gardens usually hold just one kind of crop in each container. However, there may be several pots with flowers in them set nearby. The grouped-containers give the planting a sense of abundance.

Were other moms as lazy on Mother’s Day as I was? I spent a good chunk of the day wandering around the yard, admiring the “good” parts and gathering the energy to deal with untidy, weedy, and odd parts. Best of all, plenty of plants were making flowers in my yard.

This hardy amaryllis came from the yard of my mother-in-law (aka: ‘Grandma’) in Seabrook, Tx, many years ago. We planted them in several locations around the yard, not knowing which would be best. It turns out that the sunny front flower bed supports the healthiest-looking patch.

Hardy amaryllis, from South Texas. PHOTO/Amygwh

The daylilies behind and beside the amaryllis will bloom later in the summer.

Purple clematis flowers on Mother’s day. PHOTO/Amygwh

I didn’t get to see the clematis flowers last May, because Joe and I left town for his summer work-trip before the buds opened.

Several herbs were flowering, too.

The oldest parsley plants have lots of flower buds, but no open flowers. The newer parsley, planted within the past 7-8 months, won’t bloom until either the coming fall or sometime next spring, depending on the weather.

If I included pictures of EVERYTHING in flower this past weekend, there would also be pictures of dandelions, yellow wood sorrel, hearts-a-busting, foamflower, clover, and more.

Several weeks ago, while I was working in the garden, a battered, tattered black swallowtail butterfly flitted into my dill patch. While she was there she laid some eggs. Eventually, some of those eggs hatched, and then there were caterpillars in the garden, eating the dill.

They ate and ate. After awhile, some of the caterpillars disappeared. I assume other wildlife, such as birds, ate them. The last time I saw them, a few days ago, there were three left, fat and striped and still eating the dill.

PHOTO/Amygwh

They have all gone now, which means I can finally harvest the dill. The plan is to dehydrate most of it, for use this winter. I am thinking of using it on fish, in particular. It is also good in spanakopita, but I don’t eat cheese like I used to, even feta, so that recipe is no longer “in the rotation”.

What to do about caterpillars in the garden?

Even if these striped caterpillars were more voracious eaters, gnawing my dill plants down to little nubs, I probably would just make a note to plant a lot more next year. Accepting some insect-damage is part of the organic gardening way.

In addition, the world has been losing pollinators over at least the past couple of decades, probably longer. Even though butterflies are not our most effective pollinators, removing these with either an organic pesticide or a mechanical method like smashing would not be good for the future of food in the world.

Luckily, the caterpillars have left plenty of dill for us humans.

When other caterpillars in the garden eat so much that a plant is nearly bare of leaves, then control measures may be desired. As usual, the first would be to keep the adults, the butterflies, away from the plants completely. Draping small-meshed netting or a spun row cover on a support structure over the plants can keep adult fliers away (see post about cabbage butterflies and moths).

What else do these caterpillars eat?

These caterpillars are sometimes called parsley worms, because they eat many plants that are in the parsley family. If you guessed that one of those plants is parsley, you are right! Fennel and carrots are other garden plants in the same family, as is dill.

University of Florida has published a fact sheet about the Eastern black swallowtail butterfly, its lifecycle and ecology. The fact sheet includes a list of other plants these caterpillars will eat. Some are native plants, like mock bishop weed and water hemlock. Some are not native across the entire U.S., but have been introduced. One that many people will recognize is Queen Ann’s lace.

Where did the caterpillars go?

Surprisingly, Joe and I found a chrysalis way across the yard, in a flower bed, on Thursday. I almost never find these, so this one made my day.

Chrysalis of black swallowtail butterfly from 10May2018, in Georgia. PHOTO/Amygwh

The chrysalis is on a leaf of a hardy amaryllis, given to me by my mother-in-law many years ago.

A co-worker, many years ago, who knew that I love plants, asked me what she should plant in a very large blue glazed pot that she had just bought.

Container plantings of mixed flowers and herbs, along with kale and Swiss chard, decorate various areas at Calloway Gardens and Hills & Dales Estate in Georgia.

At the time, all I could imagine was a central cluster of three dwarf okra (like ‘Cajun Jewel’), surrounded by bush beans and bright orange ‘Tangerine’ marigolds. Even now, that still seems like it would be just about perfect in a large blue pot.

There are plenty of people locally, though, who would hesitate to plant such a mix, even if it appealed to their own sense of aesthetics, because many Homeowner Associations (HOAs) prohibit the planting of edibles where they can be seen by the public.

However, there are also gardeners who are untroubled by such rules but who want to maintain a formal style while including more edibles in their yards. These gardeners might consider mixing herbs and leafy greens in with their cool-season flowers.

On a recent trip to Calloway Gardens and Hills & Dales Estate (both are about an hour’s drive South of Atlanta), the cool-season container plantings included parsley, red veined sorrel (at Calloway), Swiss chard (Hills & Dales), and several kinds of kale. These herbs and leafy greens either accented the floral display, or, in a few instances, they were the main feature.

All of the containers plantings were beautiful, and they did not look out of place, even among the clipped boxwood hedges, stone columns, and statuary.

I will be curious to find out how the plantings change for summer. Parsley works the whole year here in the South, but other herbs and greens will need to be switched for plants that can take a lot more heat. Maybe it will all be changed to okra, marigolds, and bush beans!

If you were putting together planters for a formal setting, that had to stand up to a Southern summer, what edibles would you include?

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